THE TIME MACHINE

The world’s first Science Fiction novel penned by the masterful H G Wells.

Amazingly, not only is The Time Machine the first Sci-Fi novel, written in 1895, it was also H G Wells’ first published story, published at the age of 29.

Ignore the 1950s film, the actual story – more of a novella in fact at only 90 pages – is more an exercise in prediction (as is often the case with Wells’ work). The unnamed time traveler goes forward 800,000 years in time, to the age of the surface dwelling aesthetes that are the Eloi and the chthonic, carnophagous Morlocks.

Ostensibly, it is a simple story of the comparison of societies – one that has ‘seen the light’ in the shape of the flighty Eloi – and one that has descended into darkness – that of the trogladytic Morlocks. However, the story is actually more complicated than that. One has to understand that Wells was a radical and a member of the Fabian Society. As such, what Wells is actually doing is making a comparison between the aristocracy and middle class of his day to that of the lumpen masses of the working class.

He is trying to put forward a warning. The Eloi can enjoy all the fine things of life and have a generally hedonistic existence. But at a cost. They are still dependant upon the toil and graft of the Morlocks, the workers who - conditioned to a Hobbesian life of birth, work and death – exact, as their fee for the fruits of their labours, Eloi flesh.

What Wells is, I think, trying to show, is that there should be a recognition of class interdependence rather than separation, an embracing of the different classes and an understanding that, rather than being diametrically opposed, the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’ are, in fact, symbiotic.